The rapid development of computer and information technologies in the recent decade has led to their massive use on both the consumer and the corporate market. The universal presence of electronic document, e-commerce services, cloud storage and other computer technologies has become widespread. It has become very common to store personal and confidential information on computers, and an overwhelming majority of enterprises are conducting their financial and commercial activity using electronic devices and services.
The massive use of information technologies has led to the growth of fraud with the use of these technologies—an enormous number of malicious programs have appeared, and the number of cyber attacks on computer systems has substantially increased. To protect computer systems against cyber attacks and malware, many different security technologies have been developed, such as antivirus programs, firewalls, and other, which are able to both detect known and unknown malicious programs and remove them from users' devices.
The continual growth in the number of malicious programs and the increasing complexity of their structure and behavior demand constant perfecting of the antivirus technologies. However, ever-increasing volumes of antivirus libraries and complexity of heuristic and proactive algorithms for detecting malicious programs have a negative impact on the operation of computers on which these antivirus application execute. Particularly detrimental may be “needless scans” performed by antivirus applications (e.g., situations where the scan should be aborted because the results of the scan will never be used by the antivirus application or the user) and desynchronization of data being scanned by an antivirus application and data modified by other applications executing on the computer.